A shifty-looking guy in a kilt walked into a London pub, ordered a pint & put down the plastic bag he was carrying.
The bartender asked, "What's that?"
The guy answered, "6 pounds of plastic explosives."
“Thank Christ for that!" said the barman, "I thought it might be bagpipes."
One of the most shockingly underrated masterpieces of the Renaissance is Anthonis Mor’s portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham (c. 1560), now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
When people see it today, especially in high-resolution pics, they often mistake it for a 19th-century photograph or even a hyper-realistic AI generation.
The skin texture, the eyes, the subtle sheen on the black fabric, make it feel almost disturbingly modern.
Yet this painting, created over 460 years ago, barely registers in the mainstream conversation about great art.
It deserves far more recognition.
At BBC Broadcasting House today I recalled the story (apocryphal?) of Norway’s King Haakon arriving for an interview in 1940, when Europe had fallen to the Nazis.Receptionist (hand over phone mouthpiece): ‘Sorry, dear — where did you say you were king of?’ https://t.co/3TIHy4Le4o